


Perfect Paradise (Tearing At The Seams)

by Junia



Category: The Folk of the Air - Holly Black
Genre: Angst, F/M, One Shot, Post-Canon, twk spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 00:05:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17355194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Junia/pseuds/Junia
Summary: “You betrayed me,” she spits. “You tricked me, made me promises, asked me to marry you, and then you exiled me in front of everyone. I owe you nothing.”Cardan merely raises a brow, his long index fingers absently stroking down a path on the smooth skin of his cheek. He probably doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. “Is that not what you did to me a year ago?”---One shot, taking place six months after the end of the wicked king!





	Perfect Paradise (Tearing At The Seams)

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't read the wicked king yet, don't read this!
> 
> Everybody's talking about this book again, and this is my way of dealing with my emotions. I find this scenario stupid, because I don't think Cardan would just waltz into the mortal world to get Jude back, but I wanted to write this conversation lol so this is what came out. Also, I'm slightly drunk. This might be complete bullshit ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

It's on a sunny Tuesday morning that he appears on her doorstep, six months after he exiled her. Jude doesn't want to think about how he knows where Vivianne's apartment is, who he asked for that information, nor does she want to imagine Cardan — otherworldly handsome Cardan, who looks like he came straight out of a goth magazine — walking down a mortal street. But here he is, standing in front of her, his customary, tight-lipped smile on his face and he's asking for her help.  


Jude doesn't know what to feel. For months on end she imagined this exact scenario: Cardan either showing up, or her making her grand return, and she imagined all the things she would throw at him, and all the ways she could hurt him, just so he would feel even an ounce of what she felt. Yet nothing comes out of her. Her hands tremble.

"I know you might not want to talk to me —"

_ Oh, _  and then she remembers everything that she bottled up over the last half of the year.

“You betrayed me,” she spits. “You tricked me, made me promises, asked me to marry you, and then you exiled me in front of everyone. I owe you nothing.”

Cardan merely raises a brow, his long index fingers absently stroking down a path on the smooth skin of his cheek. He probably doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. “Is that not what you did to me a year ago?”

Jude shakes her head, crosses her arm. “That’s different.”

“How so?”

Her mouth opens, closes again like she’s a mute fish, when in reality she cannot comprehend how he’s even asking her this question. He cannot be serious. “How, you ask? In every single way, you deceiving bastard! I didn’t ban you from the land where your whole family lives!”

“I doubt you wished to see Madoc or Taryn even if you still lived there, dear Jude."

"You _doubt_? That's what gave you the right to exile me from fairie?"

"Tell me, _beloved wife,"_ he says, and Jude clamps her fists shut at the term he uses, balls them so hard blood trickles down her palms, "if you're so upset about leaving your family. Is your sister Vivianne not enough? Is Oak not enough? Or is it perhaps not the people you mourn, but my throne?" 

"You wouldn't even have a throne if not for me."

It's a low blow, she's aware of that, but it's all she can muster up right now. Maybe he's right. Playing the game did make her thrive for more and more eventually, juggle more balls than she could keep in the air. That's not what it's all about, though. Cardan didn't only take her family, he also took years and years of her life there. He took that choice she had made a long time ago when she decided not to run away with Vivi and Taryn. He took her identity. And that's what's always been done for her. Madoc had taken her chance for a normal, mortal life when he crossed up on her parents' doorstep, too. No one had given her a choice. From the moment they rode back to fairie, it had been decided for her, her fate. 

Jude never gets to make her own choice. Maybe that's part of the reason she clung to that power so much, it gave her the opportunity to call the shots for once.

Cardan, oblivious to her thoughts, goes on, "As for my family,” his eyes narrow ever so slightly, “I don’t have one anymore. Not a single living relative. You made sure of that.”

 _Belekin._ Jude huffs out an angry breath. “Seriously? You’re holding Belekin’s death against me? After the way he treated _you_?”

Cardan shrugs. “I told you I’m not a murderer. I expected my wife to, at least, respect my some of my wishes.”

“Don’t you dare treat me like I’m the one who disrespected you,” she hisses, taking a step closer; invading his personal space dangerously close to point a finger at his chest, “when it was _you_ who humiliated me in front of everyone. They thought I’ve gone crazy, delusional, claiming that we were married, but I wasn’t. I'm _not._ ” Her next words come out far more hurt than she would like them to. “I trusted you, Cardan. And you broke it.”

His face is stone. There’s not a flicker of emotion, not a hint of movement in the muscles of that beautiful, dangerous face. After a moment of hard pressing silence, he says, “You never trusted to share any of your decisions with your high king either.”

Now he’s talking about himself in the third person, too. Jude wants to laugh, cry, or both.

“Because you didn’t want to be high king. Why would boring politics interest you?”

“No, _you_ never asked if I wanted to be high king,” he says, voice gaining some temper.

Well, at least she can still get under his skin.

“As if you’d ever said yes, if I had,” Jude throws at him, mockingly, carelessly.

The night they got married — no, even before that, she had seen that this wasn’t entirely true. Cardan might not have liked history lessons, or fighting with a sword, but he did take interest in the politics of fairie. As unbelievable as that sounds. But Jude is powerless here; powerless to the emotions threatening to bubble over, and powerless to what he does to her, how he treats her like  _she_ is the one who wronged him. So if the only thing she can do is rile him up, then she sure as hell will.

“Fairie is _my_ land,” Cardan grits out, edging closer. “I would have said yes, you know that.”

“Here you go with your elitist bullcrap again. I wasn’t enough because I’m only a mortal, was I? That’s why you wanted me gone, huh?”

“Jude.”

“Say it. Say how weak, fragile, powerless I am to all of you. That you wanted me so badly to be no one, you had to exile me from the entire country.” Silence. “Say it, Cardan,” she snaps.

“Jude,” Cardan merely repeats, voice not entirely soft, but there’s something warm, something more than his arrogance and excuses in there. She blinks, and suddenly his hand is on her cheek.

For a moment she lets her eyes fall shut. Memories. So many memories she desperately tried to shut out in the last months because they were too much, too raw; they cut her like broken glass.

Jude opens her eyes again and lays her own hand over his, before she whispers, “Touch me again, and I will stab you. High king, or not.”

He blinks in surprise, slowly retreats his hand.

These hands, these long, thin fingers hold too much of these memories. How they touched her in places no one had before, caressed, stroked, scratched her. These hands were the proof of a time where Jude thought she could be more than a broken spirit with a sword, someone who was, perhaps, capable of love, of loving someone who was as torn, and ripped, and haunted by all the broken dreams and promises in his life, as her. But his touch blinded her, destroyed her, and let her miss the very thing that was in front of her. That Cardan was a monster, and that’s who he will always be.

“I ban you from my apartment,” she tells him, walking to the door and holding it open for him. “And here we have the police, who will arrest you if you come here again.”

Cardan is standing still in his spot, his gaze trained somewhere on the carpet. If she didn’t know any better, she’d say he looks lost.

“Get out,” Jude repeats louder this time.

She can’t stand looking at him any longer. It awakens dangerous thoughts.

Finally, finally, he moves, walking to the door before halting in front of her. “You really don't even want to consider hearing me out?” 

Jude's jaw ticks. 

"Not even if your own mortal world might be at risk?"

If what he's saying isn't twisted into carefully, spun lies yet again, and this side of the world really is in danger, then she is certain it can be handled without  _him._

"We will see each other again, Jude," he says then.

Her nostrils flare as she slams the door against him, not caring if it will leave purple bruises on his skin. She just wants him to leave; leave her alone, so that that tight knot around her heart releases at last.


End file.
